The Moral Vision of Proverbs: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Wisdom

By Timothy J. Sandoval

Wisdom literature is an unfamiliar genre to modern readers and presents many interpretive challenges. In this major new work, respected wisdom scholar Timothy Sandoval argues that the book of Proverbs, though difficult to access for some, provides a coherent moral vision for human flourishing.

The approach Sandoval argues for in The Moral Vision of Proverbs is that of virtue ethics, or character ethics, particularly that which emerges from the classical tradition of Aristotle (as opposed to reading the book, intentionally or unintentionally, through the lenses of modern ethical systems). Sandoval engages with specialists in this ethical tradition as well as biblical scholars to make his case that Proverbs is an ancient, virtue-oriented moral discourse.

This comprehensive critical study of Proverbs analyzes the book's major topics and strives to discern the moral and philosophical presuppositions and logic of its rhetoric, all the while engaging past and present interpretive approaches. Although authored by a Christian scholar, this text will be of great interest to a broadly ecumenical audience, whether students of the Old Testament/Tanakh/Hebrew Bible, biblical scholars, or Christian ethicists and moral theologians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781493444649

Book preview

Sandoval presents Proverbs as a profoundly theological statement about the cultivation of moral character through the practice of the complex moral and intellectual activity that the sages call ‘wisdom.’ Eschewing conventional moralistic and utilitarian treatments, he brings to his reading a philosophical, cultural, and literary sophistication that encourages critical and self-critical engagement. This study will be essential for serious students of biblical wisdom traditions, in the academy and also in the church.

—Ellen F. Davis, Duke Divinity School

The book of Proverbs finally receives its full ethical due from the able hands of Sandoval, who offers the most robust and nuanced moral treatment to date of this often-overlooked book. Sandoval’s study is both sophisticated and engaging, philosophical and dialogical, offering its share of exegetical surprises, all to highlight Proverbs’ overarching goal to impart the ‘craft of living well.’

—William P. Brown, Columbia Theological Seminary

In a rich and incisive contribution to a burgeoning debate on Proverbs as a book of virtue ethics, Sandoval claims, by engaging with Aristotle and other classical writers on virtue ethics, that it is indeed an ancient, virtue-oriented moral discourse. Picking up on Proverbs’ concern with character ethics, Sandoval discovers more profound aspects of its moral rhetoric and wider moral vision, including natural law, social virtues, and practical wisdom that together embody a coherent model for promoting human flourishing.

—Katharine J. Dell, University of Cambridge

In this substantial and engaging study, Sandoval sheds light on why biblical scholarship has largely relegated Proverbs to second-tier status as a source of theological and ethical insight. Delivering his scholarly erudition in clear prose, Sandoval redresses this balance and reveals Proverbs’ merits as such an intellectual resource by examining its moral perspective in light of ancient virtue ethics. As I have with Sandoval’s other books on Proverbs, I have learned much from this book and recommend it to others.

—Gilberto A. Ruiz, Saint Anselm College

"In The Moral Vision of Proverbs, Sandoval helps dispel the all-too-common biases that Proverbs lacks moral complexity, displays simplistic act-consequence behavioral schemas, and promotes restrictive natural theologies. With precision, care, and wisdom, Sandoval demonstrates how Proverbs’ engagement with premodern, virtue-oriented moral discourse yields instruction that is ethically and theologically relevant for the contemporary world. This is a must-have for any serious reader of Proverbs."

—Patricia Vesely, Memphis Theological Seminary

© 2024 by Timothy J. Sandoval

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

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ISBN 978-1-4934-4464-9

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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For Tony

Contents

Cover

Endorsements    i

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Dedication    v

Preface    ix

Abbreviations    xiii

Introduction    1

PART 1:   The Case for Proverbs as Virtue-Oriented Moral Discourse    21

1. The Undervaluing of Proverbs’ Moral Worth: The Role of Biblical Studies and Modern Ethics    23

2. The Prologue as Hermeneutical Key: Categories of Virtues and Figurative Language    53

3. The Anthropology of Proverbs: The Nature and Happiness of Human Beings    68

4. Proverbs’ Way of Life: The Priority of Moral Agents over Right Acts    84

5. The Training of Desire for a Life of Flourishing in Proverbs    109

6. Desire, Knowledge, and Goodness: Beyond Wise and Just, Foolish and Wicked    147

7. The Centrality of Social Virtues for Flourishing    160

8. Practical Wisdom in Proverbs    175

9. The Efficacy and Limitations of Practical Wisdom in Proverbs    203

PART 2:   The Implications of Proverbs as Virtue-Oriented Moral Discourse    217

10. Proverbs’ Virtue Ethics beyond Proverbs? The Shared Moral Discourse of Proverbs and Amos    219

11. A Virtue-Ethics Approach to Cosmogony in Proverbs (Part 1): Reconsidering the Interpretive History of Natural Law, the Orders of Creation, and Empiricism in Proverbs    246

12. A Virtue-Ethics Approach to Cosmogony in Proverbs (Part 2): Reading Proverbs 8:22–31 as a Test Case    270

13. Wisdom as Practice (Part 1): Overview of Biblical Concepts and MacIntyrian Terms    310

14. Wisdom as Practice (Part 2): How MacIntyrian Practice Informs an Understanding of Proverbs’ Virtue Ethics    328

Conclusion: Worthy Wisdom, Who Can Find?    349

Works Cited    381

Author Index    400

Scripture and Ancient Sources Index    404

Subject Index    411

Back Cover    419

Preface

In my classes at Brite Divinity School, when we talk about the wisdom literature I always begin with this question: What is biblical wisdom literature? Or, what are the biblical wisdom books? Inevitably students respond by naming texts such as Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Others, often a bit more tentatively, will add the Psalms and Song of Songs to the list and perhaps even the deuterocanonical, or for Protestants Apocryphal, books of Sirach (Wisdom of Ben Sira) and the Wisdom of Solomon. I then usually note both that the biblical wisdom tradition extends to a host of other texts, including some found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that wisdom works were quite common throughout the scribal cultures of ancient West Asia and Egypt, from which emerges a work like Instruction of Amenemope, which seems clearly at points to have impacted the composition of Proverbs 22:17–23:11.

I then ask students another question: How do you know that these texts are wisdom books? After someone boldly or sheepishly states what many others surely are thinking—Because the textbook says so, which really isn’t a bad answer (it shows, at least, they’ve done the day’s reading!)—we slowly are able to uncover a series of criteria or family resemblances for identifying what counts as biblical wisdom literature. We also try to account for the arguments of those who call into question the category of wisdom itself.1 But having identified a cluster of features that suggest the traditional wisdom texts stand in an important discursive relationship with one another, I also try to convince students that biblical wisdom literature offers us a kind of ancient theological ethics—though it is a theological ethic that is often not fully appreciated today.

Persuading students of the moral worth of Proverbs is sometimes a tough sell. The book’s rhetoric and moral vision must compete with the compelling narratives and divine precepts of the Pentateuch, the soaring rhetoric of the prophetic books and the Psalter, and the engaging tales of Ruth and Esther. It also must compete with the other wisdom books: Job, which wrestles with the perennial issues of theodicy and the suffering of the just, and Qohelet, which rings uniquely modern in its pessimistic outlook and bold embrace of pleasure.

There have, however, long been scholars who have tried to appreciate Proverbs’ theological and ethical orientation and to suggest that the constructive payoff for close study of this book might rival that of other more central biblical texts. In an effort to contribute to this endeavor, this study first strives hermeneutically to read Proverbs through the lens of virtue ethics. At the same time, it also suggests that, historically speaking, the text may best be understood as a species of ancient virtue-oriented discourse. Offered by a Christian scholar, this work is concerned both with (re)describing the historical-literary aspects of Proverbs’ moral rhetoric and with constructively interpreting the book.

This project’s origins trace most broadly to my initial scholarly work, in which I studied how wealth and poverty function in the book of Proverbs.2 What follows is an extension of that work, or at least part of it. In earlier studies I emphasized how Proverbs’ rhetoric of material reward and punishment for right and wrong conduct can and ought to be understood figuratively. It promises not merely or simply real, material goods to the book’s hearers and readers who find wisdom; more fundamentally, it promises the incomparably valuable life of virtue itself. As I see now, this was an incomplete description of how Proverbs understands the relation between real material and social goods—for example, honor and wealth—and the attainment of wisdom. The key is recognizing Proverbs more fully as a virtue-oriented moral discourse. Like other such discourses (e.g., in the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions), it has a clear and legitimate place for the human pursuit of happiness (eudaemonia) that involves, indeed must include, a desire and need for the sorts of real material and social goods that I understood more figuratively in my earlier work. This figurative dimension of wealth and poverty rhetoric in particular is at play in Proverbs, but it is only one aspect of what ought to be a fuller description of Proverbs’ moral discourse.

The more immediate origins of this project, however, lie elsewhere. Having thought I had said all I wanted to say about Proverbs and happily having moved on to more focused study on books like Tobit, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the Human Distinctiveness Summer Seminar: A Program to Engage Theologians with the Dynamism of Anthropological and Evolutionary Approaches to the Human at the University of Notre Dame. Participating in this project, led by Professors Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes, reinvigorated my interest in understanding biblical wisdom literature, especially Proverbs, in terms of premodern virtue-oriented moral discourses—for in striving to understand how humans might attain well-being, such moral discourses pay significant attention to the sorts of beings humans naturally are. To Dr. Deane-Drummond and Dr. Fuentes, as well as to all the contributors and participants in the seminar, I am grateful. Besides Dr. Deane-Drummond and Dr. Fuentes, several members of this group deserve special mention. Dr. Adam M. Willows, Dr. John Berkman, Dr. Joel Hodge, and Dr. Philip A. Rolnick on different occasions generously and patiently helped me grasp better the ins and outs of Aristotle, Thomas, and virtue ethics. Dr. Arthur Walker-Jones has continued to encourage me to think more fully about how a text like Proverbs understands the relation between humans and their wisdom and the lives and wisdom of nonhuman animals with whom we share our world. Others have prodded my thinking through their writings, in conversation on conference panels and in other contexts. These are too many to name and so I mention only William P. Brown, Michael V. Fox, and Bernd U. Schipper. I am continually surprised by how many times I have started out contesting one or another point that these scholars have made about Proverbs, only to find my own views, in the end, lining up very closely to theirs.

A brief but serendipitous meeting with Jim Kinney of Baker Academic at a gathering of the Catholic Biblical Association, which revealed a mutual interest in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, led me to consider Baker as a publication venue for this book. I am grateful to the various editors at Baker for their work on the manuscript, especially to Brandy Scritchfield, who showed keen interest in my work early on, and to Eric Salo, who made many suggestions to improve my prose. The suggestions, and at points the words of both, have only improved the manuscript.

Although the following pages would not have come to see the light if not for my engagement with all these colleagues, any shortcomings belong to me alone.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my son Antonio James Sandoval Yax, the deepest joy of my life. My hope for him is only that, with God’s help, he will grow to become a good, wise, and just person.

1. See, e.g., Kynes, Obituary for "Wisdom Literature."

2. Sandoval, Discourse of Wealth and Poverty.

Abbreviations

Introduction

An interest in biblical ethics—whether the ethics of the Bible or the role and function of the Bible in ethics—is hardly a new concern of biblical scholars or of ethicists.1 Yet the last decade or two has seen increased attention to the study of character ethics and the Bible, including a keen interest in how aspects of the Hebrew Bible might reflect a virtue-oriented moral discourse, or at least how the witness of the Scriptures might be appropriated into a normative character ethics framework. The ongoing interest in virtue ethics and the Bible among biblical scholars is evident from books with titles such as Character Ethics and the Old Testament: Moral Dimensions of Scripture; The Good Life in the Old Testament; God and the Art of Happiness; and The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness: What the Old and New Testaments Teach Us about the Good Life.2 As the Old Testament terminology intimates, this development in biblical studies is largely a Christian one, but not only so. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson argues that a range of biblical literature and subsequent Jewish texts can well be understood in light of an Aristotelian-oriented conception of virtue ethics.3 In any case, the interest in considering the Bible’s moral discourse in light of character ethics is a welcome development since, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, it works against a caricature of the . . . Old Testament . . . as a set of commandments that are too familiarly labeled as ‘legalism.’4 It is welcome, too, because it provides a hermeneutic through which to analyze biblical texts that is structured differently than those critical approaches most familiar to many biblical scholars.

Proverbs and Character Ethics

The wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, and especially the book of Proverbs with its educational ethos, presents ideal texts to analyze in terms of the concerns and questions of virtue ethics.5 In 1996 William Brown did just that in a book-length study called Character in Crisis: A Fresh Approach to the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament.6 Brown’s fresh approach was precisely to scrutinize wisdom texts in terms of character ethics. Character in Crisis thus fired what for some biblical scholars was the starting gun that precipitated a concern for thinking about the Bible, especially wisdom literature, in light of character ethics. Brown himself has reprised this earlier work under the title Wisdom’s Wonder: Character, Creation, and Crisis in the Bible’s Wisdom Literature.7 Far from a simple revised edition of Character in Crisis, Wisdom’s Wonder is a substantive rethinking and expansion of the earlier work. Most distinctively, Brown supplements his earlier study by recasting it through a hermeneutic of wonder or fear seeking understanding.8 This hermeneutic, says Brown, permits him to integrate better what he, like Katharine Dell, regards as the two primary thematic axes of wisdom literature: its concern with ethics or right living and a robust theological interest in creation.9

As with Brown’s earlier work, Wisdom’s Wonder begins with a helpful sketch of the main elements of character that inform his study. He explains that moral character is the tendency to act, feel, and think in certain describable ways and refers to the sum and range of specifically ethical qualities or traits the individual or community possesses.10 Following Bruce Birch and Larry Rasmussen’s handbook on biblical ethics, he underscores the importance of perception, intention, and virtue for understanding a person’s character.11 Importantly, Brown also acknowledges that narrative (as that which gives shape to a life over time so that long-term dispositions and excellencies of character can be discerned) is an important category for virtue ethics. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, for virtue-oriented moral systems, I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’12 Of course, Proverbs consists primarily of instructional poems and short sayings. It has no clear story that it tells—an issue Brown resolves by identifying a metanarrative shape to Proverbs, whereby the silent youth that the book initially addresses moves out from the household to the Grand Central Stations of urban life and ends up in Proverbs 31 as an adult male who has successfully fulfilled these responsibilities by marrying well and finding his place among the elders.13

Yet if Brown’s Character in Crisis fired the starting shot for considering the Bible and especially wisdom literature in light of character or virtue ethics, the field of runners considering the book of Proverbs in this light was for some time rather small. Despite Brown’s seminal work and the ongoing interest in character ethics in/and the Bible generally, Proverbs did not initially receive as much sustained attention as one might have expected given the book’s clear moral rhetoric and instructional goals. Most scholars of Proverbs, both before and after Brown’s Character in Crisis, have instead been primarily concerned with other important issues: understanding the book’s act-consequence rhetoric or the sages’ supposed empirical methodology; exploring Proverbs’ relation to international wisdom works from Egypt and Mesopotamia; attempting to discern the social location of the book’s authors or editors; or considering the relationship of Proverbs’ short sayings to the folk proverbs of different peoples throughout history—to name just a few lines of investigation.14 Even the collection of essays published by the Society of Biblical Literature’s Character Ethics and Biblical Interpretation Group—Character Ethics and the Old Testament—contains only two essays that treat wisdom texts in any significant way; one of these essays is also by Brown, and neither treats Proverbs directly.15

Despite such limited efforts to understand Proverbs in terms of character ethics after Brown’s Character in Crisis, some studies of the book have begun to talk about virtues and vices, the formation of character, the role of moral exemplars in character formation, the ethics of being over the ethics of duty, and so forth—all concerns that belong to the discourse of character ethics. The present study builds on many of these efforts.

Michael Fox in his magisterial two-volume commentary on Proverbs, for instance, contends that the proverbial ethical program is most akin to the character ethics of Socrates. In particular, Fox finds in Proverbs an affinity with the Socratic dictums that virtue is knowledge, no one does wrong willingly, and all virtues are one, as well as with the premium Socrates puts on the power of the intellect in controlling character.16 Fox is no doubt correct that aspects of the Socratic vision resonate with Proverbs. However, other scholars look to Aristotle—and the ethical tradition that stems from him—as a better analogue for understanding Proverbs’ moral discourse. In response to Fox’s work, Christopher Ansberry, for instance, argues that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, with its understanding of matters such as knowledge, virtue, and flourishing, serves as a more useful heuristic model for understanding the moral vision of the book of Proverbs than Socrates’ ethical theory.17 As noted, Tirosh-Samuelson studies a range of Jewish literature, including Proverbs, in light of Aristotelian perspectives on ethics. As she says, the Bible, especially the wisdom tradition, shared the assumption of Greek philosophy that to act rightly the moral agent must acquire virtues through training that conditions the moral agent to live wisely.18

Ellen Davis, too, largely understands Proverbs in terms of a character ethics that seems ultimately to derive from Aristotle. She points to the importance of the virtues in Proverbs and highlights especially the central place of prudence in the book, while also noting ways Proverbs’ creation theology is related to virtue—all matters with which the following pages are also concerned.19 In a wide-ranging study, Zoltán Schwáb sees Proverbs’ moral discourse in terms of a virtue-oriented tradition—that of Thomistic moral theology, itself profoundly indebted to Aristotle. He does so, in part, to demonstrate that Proverbs’ concern with interested piety (my term)—people’s quest for certain external goods such as wealth in the context of moral action—can be regarded as an important aspect of a legitimate ethical perspective that is of a piece with the social interdependence and just communal relations the book also values, something that has been difficult for Proverbs scholars in the modern epoch to understand.20 Christine Roy Yoder’s commentary on Proverbs is also broadly concerned with relating categories of character ethics to the text, while her work on the formation of fearers of Yahweh studies one profile of virtue in the book.21 Yoder also considers the role that natural human emotions play in Proverbs, drawing on the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics that Martha Nussbaum elaborates.22 Elsewhere Yoder attempts to sketch Proverbs’ vision of the good life.23 L. Juliana Claassens also draws on Nussbaum to consider whether the Woman of Valor in Proverbs 31:10–31 might be reckoned as one who is fully flourishing or not.24

Anne Whitaker Stewart’s study of the poetic ethics of Proverbs is another work that considers how Proverbs might be regarded as a text of virtue ethics, as her keen engagement with the likes of MacIntyre, Nussbaum, and Stanley Hauerwas suggests. Stewart recognizes the important role the training of desire and emotion plays in virtue ethics and contends that Proverbs’ poetic literary forms are indispensable for the virtue-oriented moral work that the text seeks to carry out.25 Like Brown, Stewart also recognizes the fundamental place of narrative in much contemporary discourse of character ethics. However, she is not convinced Proverbs reveals the sort of narrative arc Brown discovers in the text. Rather, following the likes of Galen Strawson and Dan Zahavi, she proposes that character formation need not depend on narrative as strongly as the writings of MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and others suggest.26 For her and her theoretical-ethical interlocutors, character and virtue can be recognized, even formed, episodically without story. Indeed, for Stewart it almost seems that the mere existence of the nonnarrative book of Proverbs, with its concern for virtue and character, is proof of this.

Arthur Jan Keefer also studies Proverbs thoroughly in light of premodern virtue-oriented moral traditions—especially those of Aristotle and Thomas. To demonstrate that Proverbs itself constitutes a distinct moral tradition, Keefer identifies the central virtues and vices the book articulates and closely compares them with the range and conception of virtues and vices in Aristotle and Thomas. He definitively concludes that many of the moral concepts in Proverbs constitute virtues in the Aristotelian and Thomistic senses, with the book itself emerging as a moral tradition in its own right.27

Others, though less explicitly turning to Aristotle and his interpreters, also broadly consider aspects of Proverbs’ moral discourse in terms of character ethics. Sun Myung Lyu studies the book’s notion of righteousness in this light, and I explore how the book’s discourse of wealth and poverty relates to particular virtues that the book values.28 Carol Newsom proposes an important way to map constructions of the moral self throughout the Hebrew Bible and in early Judaism, including Proverbs; the moral terms and categories she deploys resonate with a turn toward analyzing biblical texts in terms of character ethics. Newsom contends that three elements form the fundamental grammar of the moral self in the Hebrew Bible: desire, knowledge, and the discipline of submission to external authority—elements that are also common to ancient virtue-oriented traditions, though she does not invoke that tradition explicitly.29

Beyond the relatively recent works just mentioned, other studies of Proverbs—including some older works published well before the last two decades—also implicitly analyze Proverbs, at least in part, via the idiom and categories of character ethics. A consideration of this phenomenon is instructive since it points to an important feature of many Proverbs studies in especially the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: namely, a significant ambiguity in descriptions of the nature of Proverbs’ moral discourse. The ambiguity is one that seems to arise from efforts to interpret the book, consciously or unconsciously, primarily through modern moral orientations—especially utilitarian and deontological schemes—without fully recognizing how aspects of the text itself may represent a premodern moral discourse like the virtue-ethics traditions of ancient Greece. This ambiguity has at times meant that aspects of Proverbs’ moral perspectives have not been clearly understood, and subsequently the book’s moral worth has sometimes been only ambivalently appreciated.

The work here differs from other valuable studies in several ways. First, in part 1, I focus on several matters somewhat more than they do: the question of why Proverbs has not often been read, until recently, as a species of virtue ethics; the nature of human beings and how it relates to their quest for happiness or eudaemonia; the necessity of training a person’s natural desires for goods that contribute to happiness; and the centrality of two particular virtues in traditions of character ethics—sociability and Practical Wisdom. In part 2, I explore several topics or questions that relate to and build on an understanding of Proverbs as a book of character ethics, which others—because of the focus and scope of their own work—do not much consider or approach from a somewhat different angle than I do. These concern how Proverbs’ conception of wisdom and virtue might relate to similar notions elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, how Proverbs’ cosmogony might fit in a virtue-ethics reading of the book, and how Proverbs’ moral tradition might be understood as a practice to be constructively engaged today (see The Plan of This Book below).

The primary task of this book is thus to describe and account for some of the ambiguity in portrayals of Proverbs’ theological ethics, while also, more fundamentally, advancing descriptions of Proverbs as an ancient virtue-oriented moral discourse—an undertaking others have already ably begun.30 I hope the efforts here will also point to ways Proverbs offers a coherent and legitimate moral vision that may still, or again, prove valuable for the constructive moral-theological work of individuals and communities for whom the Bible remains an important ethical-theological resource.

Proverbs and Character Ethics?

Given the relatively recent turn to character ethics as a heuristic lens through which to understand Proverbs, it is not surprising that some question whether virtue ethics is the most useful conversation partner when studying the Old Testament ethics of Proverbs. John Barton, for example, once contended that although aspects of Proverbs’ moral discourse might appear akin to that of character ethics, on closer inspection this proves to be only a superficial resemblance. As he suggested, the gulf between Proverbs and a modern virtue ethic may be wider than first appears.31 Barton has revised his views on Proverbs and now concedes that the book has more in common with character ethics than he once thought.32 Nonetheless, it is worth rehearsing some of the earlier views of this leading interpreter of scriptural ethics, since many of these claims will surely still resonate with other students of Proverbs.

In his earlier work, Barton understood the human characters of Proverbs as static figures. Everyone is either good or bad, wise or foolish, so that living the good life appears to be an absolute, with no gradations or variations. For Barton this meant that Proverbs eschews most ideas of moral progress, while the possibility for training and advancement in virtue is a key element of virtue ethics. Barton averred that a book like Proverbs seems to inhabit a cruder world of thought, where character is indeed all important but is seen as fixed and unchanging, almost at times as predetermined.33

It is clear, however, from Proverbs itself that at least the book’s simpletons and young addressees (and probably the כְּסִיל [dolt]34 and other moral types) can progress in wisdom and righteousness, though other figures, such as the אֱוִיל (fool), do seem incapable of moral progress (cf. 1:7; 15:5; 24:7; 27:22).35 Indeed, the book’s concern with instruction, discipline, and reproof assumes that at least some people who are not wise or just can become both, while others through discipline or punishment can at least be made not to act foolishly or wickedly. What is more, the prologue’s (1:2–7) identification of the book’s audience as not only simple youth (1:4) but also advanced sages (1:5) implies that study of the text can continue to shape the character of even those excelling in wisdom.36 Proverbs, however, does not presume that a person’s moral development is always in a positive direction. Bad human character is not necessarily static. As Newsom succinctly puts it, even the inveterate fool in Proverbs is ‘made’ rather than ‘born.’37 Finally, as we shall see further below, the entailments of the fundamental moral metaphor of the two ways, upon one of which a person must travel through life, also suggests that one can advance in wisdom. The path of a wise or just person heads somewhere;38 it has a goal or end of flourishing or well-being (not mere success) toward which one moves via the continued cultivation and right exercise of wisdom’s virtues.39 As Stewart aptly summarizes matters (also in response to Barton), character for the ancient sages can and must be cultivated, and this is why the character ethics approach is such a helpful resource for reading the book of Proverbs.40

Barton’s earlier work, however, was largely concerned to characterize the ethics of the Old Testament as a whole. Subsequently, one might surmise he may have unduly assimilated the distinct moral discourse of Proverbs to the broader understanding of Old Testament ethics he seeks to promote. In this normative Christian endeavor he draws liberally on the New Testament and Protestant theological tradition to claim that the Old Testament’s moral perspective in general is far from the idea of moral good as the distillation of the way good people actually live—a succinct articulation (and rejection) of a central dictum of virtue ethics that goes back to Aristotle.41 Indeed, for Barton, not just in Proverbs but in the broader Old Testament, the characteristic features of a virtue ethic are lacking since the emphasis in that collection of texts lies on the divine lawgiver rather than on human moral character.42

Yet if for the earlier Barton Proverbs was no virtue-oriented work, neither was it plainly a command-oriented, or deontological, moral discourse. Instead, Barton concluded that Proverbs is concerned to help readers attain success. Its discourse is more of a eudaemonism that we should have to call, in our terms, teleological, or consequentialist.43 Such a view is redolent of the conclusions that scholars like C. H. Toy (and others) articulated a century earlier.44 It is also one (as we shall shortly see) that in some shape or fashion has not been uncommon among Proverbs scholars up through the early twenty-first century.

Barton’s earlier work is thus important, not only because it illustrates how few scholars have understood Proverbs as an ancient virtue-ethics discourse until recently. It is also significant because Barton explicitly names the two primary modern ethical discourses by which Proverbs has typically been (mis)understood (i.e., consequentialism and, particularly, utilitarian thought) and by which it has typically been evaluated or judged (i.e., deontological thought)—or so I will suggest.

Barton may be correct that much of the Old Testament canon is best viewed as deontological rather than a virtue-based ethic.45 However, this hardly means that all parts of the Bible are. What is more, the sort of virtue-oriented moral vision Proverbs offers may have significantly more in common with other biblical texts, such as the pronouncements of the great prophet of social justice Amos, than is usually thought. In any case, Tirosh-Samuelson’s words about how the Bible’s ethics are regularly reckoned is an apt characterization of Barton’s earlier position: The Bible . . . is usually adduced as an example of deontological ethics, whose major modern exponent was Immanuel Kant.46 This is so even if one adds that the sort of theistic but still command-oriented perspective Barton presents can be distinguished from Kant’s project (see below).

Funlola Olojede, writing out of an African context and critical hermeneutic, also questions the appropriateness of a virtue- or character-ethics approach to the study of Proverbs, but on grounds quite distinct from those of Barton.47 She rightly notes that it is Western scholars who have regularly investigated Proverbs’ ethics and they have done so with Western ethical and philosophical presuppositions. Hermeneutically, then, biblical scholarship has largely presented only one possible kind of reading of Proverbs’ morality, and it is one that is skewed toward the normative ethical programs of Europe. For Olojede, the results of such scholarship are suspect because of their complicity with the modern European–North American projects of colonialism and imperialism.48 Olojede’s indictment of unhelpful approaches to Proverbs, however, includes more than modern, post-Enlightenment scholarship; it also includes work that draws on premodern virtue-oriented reflection as well, specifically that associated with Socrates and Aristotle. Olojede contends that an African lens applied to Proverbs better demonstrates the nature and extent of the book’s emphasis on matters such as communal well-being. Such matters resonate deeply with the ethical orientations of traditional African social-moral visions.

Olojede is quite correct about the mostly unarticulated (European) modernist moral presuppositions brought to bear on Proverbs by many biblical scholars, as will be discussed in chapter 1. However, although Socrates and Aristotle do stand at the beginning of what becomes the European philosophical tradition, her critique of the appropriateness of bringing these ancient discourses to bear on Proverbs may not be as apt. As premodern works, the classical tradition of virtue ethics emerged in a broader ancient Mediterranean context that included parts of the African continent and long before the emergence of a Europe or of European colonial-imperial hegemony. It is thus not surprising that some of the moral emphases of ancient virtue ethics—for instance, the high value placed on virtues that promote human sociality—resonate deeply with features of the traditional communitarian moralities of the African world that Olojede sketches.

Kwame Gyekye in fact offers a sketch of African Ethics that in many respects corresponds with aspects of the classical traditions of virtue ethics. He highlights the central place of character and character formation in the establishment of moral personhood in many African cultures.49 In traditional African ethics, humans are not born virtuous but have the capacity to progress in virtue, to choose to pursue good but also to pursue evil.50 What is more, the sociality of human beings and a concern for their flourishing are taken for granted: The ethical values of compassion, solidarity, reciprocity, cooperation, interdependence, and social well-being are central.51 Social or communitarian virtues are highly prized in order to establish a common good reckoned as a good for human beings that embraces "the needs that are basic to the enjoyment and fulfillment of the life of each individual."52 All these features of African moral perspectives, as we shall see more fully in the following pages, resonate with key aspects of traditions of virtue ethics.

In light of Gyekye’s work, one might think that differences between the classical tradition of ethics and African moral orientations may not be as sharp as Olojede intimates. Whatever the case, Olojede herself is ultimately not concerned to pitch a Socratic-Aristotelian approach to studying Proverbs against an African-centric approach; nor does she simply reject the insights of Western scholars who look to Aristotle or Socrates as heuristic guides to understanding Proverbs. Instead, she is most concerned to show the need for an African approach to biblical ethics in the African context.53 In her efforts to do so, Olojede clearly senses how the moral vision of Proverbs resonates deeply with traditional African morality. To the extent that this book strives to revise interpretations of Proverbs predicated on modernist European thought—by suggesting that an ethical perspective emerging from the ancient Mediterranean world is a more apt dialogue partner for studying the text—it is allied with Olojede’s work.

Olojede’s work and Barton’s earlier studies suggest Proverbs might not best be read in light of character ethics. Though perhaps not fully compelling, they nonetheless serve as important cautions for any attempt to do so. As I noted, descriptions of the nature of Proverbs’ moral discourse are often ambiguous, and despite some significant efforts to study Proverbs in light of character ethics, certainly not all is settled when it comes to describing the book’s moral vision. Not all scholars have considered the possibility that Proverbs may in part be a book of virtue ethics; among those who have, not all are equally or fully persuaded of the ways in which it is. One can continue to ask: How and to what extent can or ought Proverbs be understood as a book of character ethics? What features of the text indicate that its moral discourse—its vision of wisdom—ought to be understood as a kind of virtue-oriented moral discourse? And one can still query about the interpretive implications of understanding Proverbs as a book of character ethics.

Reading the Book of Proverbs: Preliminary Matters

Israel’s legendary wise king, Solomon, is traditionally considered the author of Proverbs. The text, however, is rather obviously an anthology of wisdom poems and collections of sayings. Several sections are ascribed to other individuals—sometimes anonymous, sometimes named. Some are derivative of other ancient and non-Israelite wisdom works. Proverbs 22:17–24:22 (or at least 22:17–23:11), for instance, is regularly regarded as dependent in some way on the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope and perhaps began with the phrase words of the wise.54 Similarly, Proverbs 24:23 introduces the instruction that follows with the words, These also are sayings of the wise (גַּם־אֵלֶּה לַחֲכָמִים). Proverbs 30:1 speaks of the words of Agur, and Proverbs 31:1 presents the short instruction that follows as the words of King Lemuel . . . that his mother taught him.55 Other sections of the book (Prov. 1–9; 10:1–22:16; 25–29), however, are directly associated with Solomon via superscriptions; Proverbs 25:1 also mentions the eighth-century-BCE Judahite king Hezekiah. However, allusions to Solomon are typically understood as traditional ascriptions and not claims of authorship. Critical scholarship thus rejects Solomonic authorship of the book of Proverbs.56

If it is clear that Solomon did not write Proverbs, how and when the different sections of the book were composed and brought together into a literary whole remains a complicated question. Most assume that the collections of proverbial sayings in 10:1–22:16 and 25–29 constitute the earliest, preexilic sections of Proverbs. To them were added the poems of Proverbs 1–9 sometime after the monarchy ended. Still later, chapters 30 and 31, and finally the book’s prologue (1:2–7), were appended to a Proverbs scroll. When exactly the final form of the Hebrew (MT) version of Proverbs took shape may be as late as the Hellenistic era. Indeed, the placement and ordering of certain sections of Proverbs appear not to have been fixed across textual traditions even as late as the writing of the Greek version (LXX Proverbs), which differs not insignificantly from the Hebrew (MT), most notably in its moralizing rhetoric and especially its ordering of certain sections of the text.57

As interesting as arguments concerning the literary and textual development of Proverbs may be, for my purposes here it is not necessary to take a strong position on any of it. In the following pages, I strive to discern and analyze the nature of the ethical discourse and moral vision of Proverbs as they emerge in the final form of the book; my study is what biblical scholars call a synchronous one. But I hope my synchronous analysis is undertaken with a strong diachronic sensibility that recognizes that sections of the Proverbs anthology emerged from teachers and scribes in different historical periods and probably in distinct social-economic contexts. This is especially true of Proverbs 30 and 31, which likely date later than much of the book. But it can also be true for the relationship between the instructional poems of Proverbs 1–9 and the short sayings of Proverbs 10–29, the latter surely related in some complex way to the folk wisdom of the broader populations of ancient Israel and Judah.58

There is thus no specific historical reason to insist that the moral rhetoric and impulses of Proverbs’ diverse sections will precisely correspond. Still, my own sense is that most of the book ultimately emerges from scribal and educational contexts, which may have been temporally distant from one another but are sufficiently analogous in sociological terms for them to have a high degree of consistency of moral vision and emphasis. In this regard, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin and his close collaborator Pavel Medvedev offer helpful insights about how the distinct generic parts of a composite work might function. The distinguishable parts of such composite works, they contend, may well be separate and finished [whole] utterances independently oriented in reality.59 Yet such utterances also have become constitutive parts of some larger utterance. As parts of the larger utterance, they can mean more than they would as independent utterances because they contribute to the whole utterance’s meaning.60 Just so, the different sections of Proverbs with their distinct literary genres can be regarded as independent utterances that entail somewhat unique ways of comprehending the world. Yet this diverse material now belongs to a single utterance that is the book of Proverbs and so informs the meaning of that larger work.61 It is with the meaning(s) of the whole utterance of the book of Proverbs that I am most concerned.

The Plan of This Book

The task of part 1 of this book is to suggest how and to what extent Proverbs is an ancient, virtue-oriented, moral discourse. Part 2 considers several key texts and interpretive questions in light of part 1’s claims. A central feature of the exegetical and constructive interpretive task of this book is thus to draw out and describe the moral-philosophical presuppositions and logic of Proverbs’ moral rhetoric against which the book’s explicit teachings might best make sense and be analyzed. For this task, premodern moral and philosophical thought and terminology—especially those of Aristotle and his contemporary interpreters—will be an apt guide, providing useful concepts and vocabulary for understanding Proverbs’ teachings. This is so even though one might legitimately be suspicious of understanding a discourse from one time and place (the book of Proverbs) in light of another discourse from another time and place (classical traditions of virtue ethics). One must always remember that the conceptual links between Proverbs and other moral discourses are heuristic and not exact. The Hebrew book is no Nicomachean Ethics, presenting philosophical arguments or logical proofs for the presuppositions of its moral instruction and rhetoric.62 Yet as Tirosh-Samuelson claims, although the Bible was not a philosophical text and it did not propose a systematic account of any topic, including virtue and happiness, the theologico-ethical outlook of much of Scripture, especially as expressed in the Wisdom stratum, shares similarities with virtue traditions and can be theorized or expressed in propositional terms.63

My primary guides in this book’s task include Aristotle himself and some of the most prominent contemporary interpreters of the Aristotelian moral tradition—Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum—as well as the eminent scholar of ancient Greek ethics, Julia Annas. My intention is not to explicate fully the work of these prominent thinkers. It is rather to argue that if Proverbs shows concerns sufficiently analogous to those highlighted by virtue-oriented moral traditions and thinkers, we can be more confident that Proverbs is a book of character ethics and how it is so. My ultimate thesis is simple: because Proverbs reveals genuine concern with matters of character ethics, one is warranted in studying the book’s wisdom—its moral vision—and analyzing its discourse features in light of and in terms of virtue-oriented moral discourse.

In chapter 1, I suggest that biblical scholarship has not understood Proverbs clearly or sufficiently as an ancient virtue-ethics text. Instead, it has often ambiguously described the nature of the book’s moral discourse. Consequently, Proverbs’ moral worth has often been only ambivalently appreciated. I begin to account for this situation by considering certain trends within biblical studies, and wisdom studies in particular. On the one hand, such tendencies marginalize the theology and ethics of Proverbs within and in relation to the theology and ethics of the rest of the Bible. On the other hand, Proverbs scholarship has also tended to interpret and evaluate the book’s moral discourse—whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly—through the lenses of modern ethical theory above all utilitarian schemes and deontological sensibilities. (Scholarship has also often applied to Proverbs literal-minded historical reading strategies likewise largely developed in modernity.) Much in this situation, I suggest, is due to what MacIntyre has identified as a kind of historical amnesia—an incomplete remembering—in the modern epoch of premodern modes of moral reflection.

Chapter 2 considers Proverbs’ prologue (1:2–7) to underscore two key points about the book’s moral discourse. First, Proverbs’ opening lines reveal that—like character ethics—the book is concerned with virtue, whether intellectual and practical dispositions or moral-social virtue. Second, the prologue also makes clear that its readers should attend to the text’s literal or plain-sense teachings, as well as to its figurative and symbolic dimensions. The final section of chapter 2 analyzes how these dual emphases inform our understanding of Proverbs’ cause-and-effect rhetoric. Both features of the prologue are important for understanding the logic of the book’s act-consequence rhetoric in light of premodern notions of causality or means-end relations, which MacIntyre also describes. The analysis points to subtle and symbolic ways the sages have imagined the exercise of the virtues to result not so much in various external goods but in a different internal relation to a broader conception of a flourishing life, which itself entails some enjoyment of external goods. This last section of chapter 2 also alludes to aspects of Proverbs’ virtue-oriented discourse that subsequent chapters will elaborate and build on.

Chapter 3 explains the necessity of character-ethics traditions, of knowing what sort of being humans are and what constitutes their happiness or flourishing. The anthropology of Proverbs reveals that the ancient sages—not unlike traditions of character ethics—reckoned people as material, spiritual, intellectual, and social creatures with a range of needs and desires. Humans for Proverbs are also typically corrigible, able to learn virtue and advance in wisdom—at least up until adulthood—in ways that enable the proper understanding of how various goods contribute to human thriving and how such goods are appropriately pursued. For the sages, humans are quite like MacIntyre’s description of the species as dependent rational animals.64

Chapter 4 considers how character-ethics traditions prioritize moral agents over right acts. These traditions focus on the virtues and vices that make up people’s character rather than on other ethical matters, such as deontological rule following or utilitarian pleasure/happiness seeking. The chapter highlights the emphasis in virtue-oriented traditions on people’s way of life—whether it be a good and virtuous path or a vicious and wicked path—and how this emphasis is abundantly evident in Proverbs too.

Chapter 5 takes up the importance of virtue ethics to rightly train a person’s emotions and desires for goods that humans naturally pursue. Drawing on chapter 2’s insistence that Proverbs itself signals the reader to attend to the figurative or symbolic dimensions of its moral discourse, chapter 5 describes how the book seeks to train the natural longings of its presumed young male audience—especially longings for things such as material wealth and sexual satisfaction. The sages reckon wisdom, or the acquisition of virtue, as more valuable and desirable than anything else because wisdom enables an understanding of both the place goods like sex and riches have in the quest for happiness and the appropriate ways to pursue such goods.

Chapter 6 briefly explores the relationship between ethical and intellectual virtue in Proverbs and how both relate to the desires of the individuals discussed in chapter 5. Here the focus is on a few moral types in the book who are not described as wise and just or foolish and wicked. These moral agents can helpfully be analyzed in terms of Aristotle’s distinctions between virtuous or vicious people whose characters are fully settled and those he describes as enkratic or akratic—those whose desires are not fully trained, yet whose moral knowledge and rational wills make them able to do good (enkratic) or not (akratic).

The next three chapters (7–9) highlight the central place of two key virtues in traditions of character ethics and in Proverbs: sociability and Practical Wisdom. Proverbs considers the exercise of these to be essential for human flourishing (cf. chap. 3). Chapter 7 recalls dimensions of virtue-oriented ethical discourses—first mentioned in chapter 1—that are sometimes not well recognized or acknowledged. The chapter then describes the central place social virtue (e.g., justice or being just) holds in Proverbs’ moral rhetoric. Chapters 8 and 9 turn to the more complex and implicit ways Proverbs construes a full understanding of wisdom as Practical Wisdom, analogous to the notion of phronēsis in classical traditions. Chapter 8 highlights especially the distinction Proverbs implicitly makes between practical virtue and Practical Wisdom. Chapter 9 considers the limits of both practical virtue and Practical Wisdom for Proverbs. It also considers the important role that narrative and moral exemplars—stories and lives in which a full Practical Wisdom is glimpsed—play in virtue ethics, describing how Proverbs both does and does not point its readers to moral agents who can serve as moral models.

After establishing in part 1 the manner in which Proverbs can be said to constitute an ancient virtue-ethics discourse, I consider in part 2 how Proverbs’ rhetoric and long-standing interpretive questions might be analyzed afresh. In chapter 10, I revisit the question of the influence Proverbs’ wisdom discourse might have had on the book of Amos. After discussing the history of this topic, I use a Bakhtinian conception of intertextuality to suggest not that Proverbs overtly drew on Amos or vice versa, but that the two texts reveal a significant relationship to one another in terms of their moral rhetoric. This fact might be explained by the place an early Proverbs scroll held in Israelite and Judahite education.

Chapters 11 and 12 are complementary chapters. Together they consider how Proverbs 8:22–31—the famous description of Woman Wisdom’s activities at or before the creation of the cosmos—might be understood as consonant with a virtue-ethics reading of the book. I reconsider whether and how Proverbs’ teaching might constitute or promote a kind of natural law. Chapter 11 sketches the way such a question has typically been formulated in Proverbs studies and contends that the matter might be better recast in terms of ancient conceptions of virtue ethics. Instead of suggesting that in Proverbs Wisdom’s relation to the cosmos means that humans can discover objective moral orders of creation and thereby discern divinely ordained rules or natural law for individuals and society, I suggest that Wisdom’s infusion of the primordial stuff out of which Adonai creates the cosmos means that humans (and other creatures) are created with a wisdom appropriate to the kind of being we are. Full and genuine wisdom is not discovered out there in the laws of the created world, but it can and should be developed from our own human nature—as material, intellectual, spiritual, and social beings whose happiness and well-being typically depend